The development of computerized distributed information resources, such as the Internet, allows users to link to a computer network and retrieve vast amounts of electronic information previously unavailable in an electronic medium. Such electronic information increasingly is displacing more conventional means of information transmission, such as newspapers, magazines, and even television.
Electronic information transferred between computer networks (e.g., the Internet) can be presented to a user in hypertext, a metaphor for presenting information in a manner in which text, images, sounds, and actions become linked together in a complex, non-sequential web of associations that permit the user to "browse" through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. For example, traveling among links to the word "iron" in an article displayed within a graphical user interface in a computer system might lead the user to the periodic table of the chemical elements (i.e., linked by the word "iron"), or to a reference to the use of iron in weapons in Europe in the Dark Ages. The term "hypertext" is used to describe documents, as presented by a computer, that express the nonlinear structure of ideas, as opposed to the linear format of books, film, and speech. The combination of hypertext documents connected by their links in the Internet is referred to as the World Wide Web (WWW).
Networked systems utilizing hypertext conventions typically follow a client/server architecture. A "client" is usually a computer that requests a service provided by another computer (i.e., a server). A "server" is typically a remote computer system accessible over a communications medium such as the Internet. Based upon such requests by the user at the client, the server presents information to the user as responses to the client. The client typically contains a program, called a browser, that communicates the requests to the server and formats the responses for viewing (browsing) at the client.
The browser retrieves a web page from the server and displays it to the user at the client. A "web page" (also referred to as a "page") is a data file, or document, written in a hyper-text language that may have text, graphic images, and even multimedia objects, such as sound recordings or moving video clips associated with that data file. The web page can be displayed by the client browser as a viewable object. A viewable object can contain one or more components, such as spreadsheets, text, hotlinks, pictures, sound, and video objects.
When a client workstation sends a request to a server for a web page, the server first transmits (at least partially) the main hypertext file associated with the web page, and then loads, either sequentially or simultaneously, the other files associated with the web page. The constructed web page is then displayed on a client display screen. A web page may be larger than the physical size of the display screen, and devices such as graphical user interface scroll bars can be utilized by the viewing software (i.e., the browser) to view different portions of the web page.
Many web pages are filled with numerous images. These images can be text, graphic images, video clips, or even entire windows. Some of these images are important and interesting; for example, a navigation bar. Others are more annoying; an example is advertisements. Current browsers allow the user to configure that either all images are displayed, or none at all. This "all or nothing" approach does not provide the user with an acceptable solution to managing the images in web pages.
From the foregoing, it can be seen that a need exists for a method and system for managing the display of images contained in web pages.